Sometimes, just after you’ve done something astronomically stupid, there comes a brief pang of understanding – too late to prevent disaster.
An American Professor of Earth Science, Robert Hazen, describes just such a moment in his book about carbon, Symphony in C (a great book, by the way, for anyone wanting to know more about carbon and climate change).
The prof was using an experiment to show an undergraduate class how polymers can be made.
“Nothing would have gone wrong,” he wrote ruefully, “if I had followed the instructions.” He poured two liquids into a plastic bottle, mixed them together, and screwed down the top.
The liquids reacted, turning into a gooey, intensely sticky foam – polyurethane.
“It was, in retrospect, an extremely bad idea to mix the liquids in a plastic water bottle and screw on the top – especially when I hadn’t tried it before. The experiment started off well, but when the usual foaming slowed and stopped, it dawned on me that a lot of pressure must be building up in the thin-plastic bottle.”
Hazen had made, in effect, a small explosive device.
He hastily loosened the bottle top and… bang! The cap hit the ceiling and ricocheted about the class, followed by a “remarkable projectile blast of polyurethane, liberated by the pressure release. A yellow mass shot up 25 vertical feet and splattered the ceiling tiles [and a few students] with gobs of intensely sticky, yellow [stuff].”
Fortunately, no one was hurt.
This kind of polyurethane goo is used to repair cracks in concrete, or as insulation in hard-to-reach crannies. Bits of it are still sticking to the ceiling of the lecture hall.
Reading about this experiment gone wrong somehow made me think of Chris Penk, a man embroiled in a hasty experiment involving insulation, an increase in pressure and imminent chaos.
Penk, a property lawyer before becoming Minister for Building and Construction, appears set on rolling back the ‘H1’ home insulation standards bought in last year.
Outrage is rising among both the building industry and housing and health experts like foam in a bottle.
Green Building Council chief executive Andrew Eagles fumed in the NZ Herald: “It’s unbelievably shortsighted and goes against global best practice for housing. This is effectively ripping insulation out of children’s homes.”
Insulation move ‘bonkers’ say eco-building experts, shouted a Stuff headline, over an incredulous piece by Bob Burnett from the Superhome Movement Charitable Trust, and Baden Brown from eHaus. It was “outrageous” they fumed, that even these building standards, which didn’t go far enough, were being overturned because some builders thought they caused overheating.
“Many homes that suffer from [overheating] have been around long before last year’s insulation upgrades,” sighed Burnett. ‘[This] highlights the other missing key Building Code requirements which would prevent such problems. Insulation doesn’t cause overheating. It stops heat transfer, allowing a house to be warmer in winter and actually cooler in summer. The number one cause for overheating is faulty design. This can include poor site orientation, inappropriate proportions of glazing, lack of optimal shading, and inadequate ventilation.”
The new code was hammered out after years of submissions – more, according to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), than all other code changes combined for the last five years. Ninety-eight percent called for tougher standards.
The new code, said Eagles, is backed by the Construction Industry Council, Certified Builders, Master Builders, Community Housing Aotearoa, the Building Industry Federation, Institute of Architects and the Building Research Association of New Zealand (BRANZ).
“There is overwhelming support from the industry to maintain these standards,” he wrote. “Any rollback will create considerable uncertainty for industry and the supply chain who have invested in meeting them.”
Five public senior health researchers, plus Eagles, co-wrote a Public Health Expert Briefing, saying the standards had “almost universal support from scientists, industry, and consumers.”
According to the government’s own MBIE figures, homes meeting the code will require 40 percent less heating than older homes.
Living in a well-insulated home, as most of us know, won’t just help our budget. Extensive research shows it reduces illness, days off work, prescriptions, hospitalisations, and mortality – with a death prevented per year for every 1000 homes insulated.
In caving to a few members of the building industry, the minister is going against the evidence. Perhaps he should read the fine print.
BRANZ analysis suggests that homes built to H1 standards would save “three to 13 tonnes of carbon per house.”
That might not matter to Penk, but it would certainly matter to Hazen, the carbon expert with a deep understanding of Earth processes.
“Human activities are causing the Earth to heat up,” he wrote in Symphony in C. “This conclusion is not a matter of opinion or speculation. Some things about Earth are true, and this is one of those things.”
• Jenny Nicholls
©Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2024
